If you want to know if your hosting company is green or not, you can do a few simple things:
1. Ask them where their servers are located.
If the data centers are located in Los Angeles, Chicago, or San Antonio then the chances are these are powered by fossil fuels.
2. Don’t buy the bull.
All hosting companies will tell you that they are using low-watt lights and energy efficient servers. Well, the funny thing is that the hosting companies did not make this choice, the manufactures did. Energy Star compliance is not a service provider issue, it’s a manufacturer issue.
3. Ask what they are doing different today versus 10 years ago that makes them green.
Hosting companies are trying to maximize profits with their investments and with the competition, more storage demands, and increasing energy costs, the traditional web host can’t make radical changes to match the times.
4. Do they pay carbon offsets?
If so trace the companies they are paying and find out who owns them, then find out what these organizations are doing with the contributions. Often these are shell companies setup by energy companies to raise money without needing to provide any quantifiable results. These are unregulated, rogue entities that can be setup with a few forms and some clever promotion.
5. Who says they are green?
If the hosting company has pay-to-play badges that say they are green then this is a red flag. Most badges are created by themselves or bought to nudge them out of the grey area of greenwashing.
6. What energy sources are they using to power their servers?
Depending on the state and the energy company in that town, it’s pretty easy to find out knowing who sends the energy bills. The buildings the servers are in and the cooling systems are big polluters to the environment. It is hard to be environmental when you have to keep a 10,000 square foot room at a cool 65 degrees every minute of the year.
7. Who is hosting who?
There are so many resellers who buy server space from some server farm in Mclean, Virginia and then sells “hosting” under a green brand they created. If the company has the word “green” in the name there is a high chance it’s one of these outfits.
If you are working with a reseller of web hosting and want to know where they are buying their servers, then you can visit:
http://whois.domaintools.com/
Step 1. Find a site to verify.
We will test a site called greengeeks since Eco-Tuesdays uses them to host their site.
Step 2. Go to Domain Tools http://whois.domaintools.com/
Just put the URL in the box and submit.
Step 3. Look for the IP Location in the middle of the page.
Normally you can see where the server is located. This is where your website would be “physically” if you host with them.
Step 4. Go to the parent hosting company you found above.
In this case it is singlehop.com
Step 5. Verify this company with Domain Tools again! You never know… http://whois.domaintools.com/
Usually the first place is the main data center but it’s not always obvious. In this case we clicked on “traceroute” just above the screen above where we look for IP Location. That is where we saw Server Central listed as the main data center. http://www.scnet.net/
Step 6. Visit that website.
Following the digital trail you see that if you are paying for green hosting at one place, you may be really at the same old hosting you got before just in a new package.
This guide is meant to educate and inform consumers to make better decisions for their hosting.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
After building two sturdy web applications on the AISO.net solar data center we are pleased to announce that we can now offer this to customers. Most developers with root access can build their ruby server but we can configure it to your liking. Let us know what type of application you are building and we can recommend some best practices.
